Microsoft reached a billion in 1990. [thocp.net] And that's back when it was a different world, there were no (very few) hard drives, no (very few) "laptops", no smartphones, no (well, almost no) internet, and very few people owned a PC. Reaching a billion considering all those factors against them is amazing.

And that's back when it was a different world, there were no (very few) hard drives, no (very few) "laptops", no smartphones, no (well, almost no) internet, and very few people owned a PC. Reaching a billion considering all those factors against them is amazing.

I wonder how much more they would have made if Oracle didn't rip them off. I dont count CentOS though. The vast majority of people using CentOS either can't afford Redhat or will move up when they can.

We're by no means a "diehard Oracle customer" (in fact, I can't stand Oracle), but we do use OEL for our Oracle database nodes, if for no other reason than to avoid a finger-pointing circle-jerk when Oracle determines a problem lies with the underlaying OS.

I really wish Redhat had some much cheaper, "updates only" version of their software.. When I worked in Education, we had a version that was $50/year.. I would love something like that for my own personal use.. and maybe a $100/y version for companies.. You know.. Like Oracle Does with their clone of redhat..

Isn't the point of Red Hat the support they provide? If you're not buying the support, why run Red Hat at all? Debian can do anything Red Hat can, and it's completely free.

There are cases when you need to run a RHEL-compatible system, but don't want/need the expensive support contract from Red Hat (like when you have to have support for expensive, enterprise-level software where the vendor only supplies drivers in the form of a RHEL-compatible RPM). This is why projects such as CentOS exist.

I wonder how much more they would have made if Oracle didn't rip them off. I dont count CentOS though. The vast majority of people using CentOS either can't afford Redhat or will move up when they can.

Or don't need the redhat support, or keep redhat on one machine for support and use CentOS on the other 3000 servers.

While technically true, this argument does fall apart when a company such as Oracle rebrands RHEL into OEL, then goes on the offensive against RHEL/Red Hat when they don't have much of a team of developers to continue developing OEL should the hypothetical, but very unlikely, situation of Red Hat going away. In a situation such as that it's kind of like Oracle is biting the hand that feeds it.... CentOS on the other hand rebrands RHEL, but does not try to present themselves as the main proprietor of the distribution. In addition the CentOS community does try to push bug reports upstream when possible.

Red Hat also announced that they will be donating $100,000 to each of the following organizations; Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Software Freedom Law Center and UNICEF Innovation Labs. http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/3/A-billion-thanks-to-the-open-source-community-from-Red-Hat

That's great that RH finally passed that mark... that's on top of the good news they've been announcing for the past few years.. from their revenue growth through the recession (thanks to the subscription model), to their entry into the fortune 500 [redhat.com].

But does anyone here think Bill Gates or Microsoft stays awake worried about RH? They pulled in 72x more revenue, 159x more profits, and have 63x more cash on hand (50.69b vs 808m) than Red Hat. Microsoft even has a better profit margin than RH (32.5% vs 13.3%).

MS is a Mature Company. They are having a hell of time milking their Cash Cows right now. MS Office and MS Server both have significantly declining sales. Everything else they have touched has been a loss leader (xbox, bing, win mobile etc) This is an attempt to capture market share before falling completely into the toilet.
Red Hat inc on the other hand has grown from the ether into a profitable company despite a product portfolio significantly smaller than M$. Where Red Hat Shines is the offer the best

But does anyone here think Bill Gates or Microsoft stays awake worried about RH? They pulled in 72x more revenue, 159x more profits, and have 63x more cash on hand (50.69b vs 808m) than Red Hat. Microsoft even has a better profit margin than RH (32.5% vs 13.3%).

Perhaps there is a billion dollars worth of revenue from the hobbyist and Student Market?

What Red Hat did which was shift away from trying to compete on the Desktop Market (Microsoft bread and butter) and focus more on the Server Market where Microsoft while a major player has more of an equal footing. Where they had a lot of legacy Unix shops that wanted to get off Unix Platforms but still keep the Unixy goodness.

In general most Novel Shops went to Windows, most Unix Shops went to Linux. By "most" meaning there are exceptions, and plenty of anecdotal stories. As moving to the other platform was much easier for the company.

For new companies. They would split across Microsoft and Linux (With Red Hat offering enterprise level support) Some would go with Microsoft and Other with Linux...

So in a competive market I am not supprised that Red Hat made money. They played smart business and they made money.

... King George III probably said that those rebellious colonists in America would never amount to anything, either. Freedom rules.

Rules? Uh, no. Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle... still way bigger. Saying that open source or free software as a business model "rules" is like comparing Switzerland to the US or China. Yes, it's great that it's a very free country and has been independent for many centuries... but it doesn't "rule" anything.

Apple, IBM and Oracle are all very dependent on open source. OS X wouldn't even exist without it. The open source movement is only a few decades old, yet it has transformed computing forever. The finance industry, as in the case of the NYSE, is dependent on it. That finance industry is far larger and more powerful than any nation. Just because open source doesn't stand as a single, monolithic entity doesn't mean it isn't a decisive force in the world today.

To a large extent, Red Hat is cashing in on a much broader community effort that has developed Linux and sold it as a viable platform to software developers, says George Weiss, an analyst with the Gartner technology research firm. But Red had a hand in this. “Give credit to Red Hat for fashioning a business model that created value from subscription support,” he adds.

Emphasis mine. I don't think that the success of Red Hat depended on Linux being a viable platform for software developers. Rather, it depended on Linux being a viable platform for servers (I'm not meaning to under-emphasise the desktop users, or the developers, here; all I'm trying to say is that the success of Red Hat probably has little to do with Linux being "developer friendly" and more to do with the server market [and all that entails]).

Technically, Red Hat's "product" is a compiled copy the Linux kernel and associated Open Source Packages required to create a working operating system. Yes the source is free, and Red Hat does follow through on the GPL obligations, but on it's own the source is useless, you can't actually use it without you or someone else spending the time and effort to compile it first. Thus Red Hat is "selling" a compiled and packaged form of the associated source code, however it's sold in the form of a s

Technically, Red Hat's "product" is a compiled copy the Linux kernel and associated Open Source Packages required to create a working operating system. Yes the source is free, and Red Hat does follow through on the GPL obligations, but on it's own the source is useless, you can't actually use it without you or someone else spending the time and effort to compile it first. Thus Red Hat is "selling" a compiled and packaged form of the associated source code, however it's sold in the form of a subscription whi

I'm not sure there's a contradiction here, Red Hat obviously made their money on the server market as that was their specialization. But the reason they could specialize is that developers can pull Linux in the direction they want. You want it to run on embedded? Mobile? Tablets? Desktops? Servers? Supercomputers? On x86 or PowerPC or ARM or PDP-11? Linux has become its own gravity well, whatever you want to do you'd rather add that functionality to Linux than trying to roll your own thing. Ultimately that'

I'm a developer (on RHEL 5/6) in a company on the same size order as MS that deploys RH or the CentOS derivative on the high tens-of-thousands of nodes scale.

Congratulations and all, but how could you not be successful when providing such a superior product to your competition. RHEL beats MS server variants in every way for ease of development (integrating dozens of nodes is a breeze, IA is consistent and well documented), cost, features, and support (we can call up RHEL developers at any time to request they investigate problems and push out fixes on timely schedules).

They are a great company, and don't make you feel dirty for using their product.

I've always found RHEL cheaper than windows as well as faster and more stable. Plus RHEL don't use support to push more product the way I've seen MS do. Got a problem? Any problem? Buy more domain controllers. Yeah right.

What I find impressive about Redhat is not Linux volume per se(woah, you mean that a world with a zillion cheap webservers wants an x86 unix for free? I never would have guessed); but that they've continued to sustain demand for paid offerings in the face of free-if-you-bring-your-own-expert stuff(which is unattractive at a small scale; but becomes economic if you are big enough) and various 'appliance-ized' Redhat clones put out by the vendors of the software designed to run on top of them(eg. Oracle's database + I can't believe it's not Redhat offering)...

It seems totally unsurprising that much of the internet hosting going on today wouldn't even be economically possible if they were paying a tithe to Redmond, and it is similarly unsurprising that vendors of expensive applications would really rather that you pay for their software, not for the OS it happens to run on. Much more interesting that there is a place for Redhat in all this...

Congratulations Bob and Marc! To this day RHEL is probably my favorite distro (not trying to start a distro war), and I've been using RH it since apollo. They were cool guys then, and I can only imagine they've stayed the same.

>> "'We think of Linux as a competitor in the student and hobbyist market but I really don't think in the commercial market we'll see it in any significant way.' Bill Gates, 2001."

#1: That wasn't a "prediction." That was a positioning statement, meant for the ears of commercial buyers and software channels, that Microsoft will remove its good graces from anyone who tries to interfere with Microsoft's business operating system sales.

#2: Microsoft revenues in Q1 2012 were $20B, or about 60 times Red Hat's. If anything, Microsoft is probably thrilled to have a relatively tiny, but still growing competitor in the market to keep the anti-trust folks at bay. (Remember those guys from about 10 years ago?)

If anything, Microsoft is probably thrilled to have a relatively tiny, but still growing competitor in the market to keep the anti-trust folks at bay. (Remember those guys from about 10 years ago?)

No. They are not. Because that $1 Billion revenue of RedHat's represents Hundreds of Billions of dollars of lost revenue to Microsoft. Every server running Linux is a server that MIGHT have a Windows license if free offerings such as Linux weren't so capable.

Without RedHat and other tiddling (compared to Microsoft) companies improving Linux every day, Microsoft would be the highest revenue company in the world and their stock would still be increasing in value.

We're looking at this differently. I'm saying that if it weren't for RedHat and all the other people working on Llinux and/or other free offerings, Microsoft and proprietary Unix would be only choices for all those servers out there. Millions of them. And I doubt Microsoft would be selling licenses at 10 for $1100 if free competion didn't exist.

Every sale RedHat and every other seller of Linux makes supports not only their paying clients, but scores of additional users who make use of the software they w

Actually, MS never had a monopoly in the server space and really has nothing to worry about in terms of anti-trust investigations. Outside of corporate IT (which itself is undergoing a huge transformation due to BYOD), corporate IT spawned app/web development (.NET/ASP), and gaming (which itself is debatable due to the looming death of dedicated gaming devices and the rise of smartphones and tablets), MS has no real momentum in software platforms.

The point being that Red Hat is not competing against Microsoft but rather they are filling a different market than Microsoft. Make no mistake that Red Hat software is cheap. The TCO is fairly high since Linux Admins tend to command a much higher salary, generally don't crossover as much (I know plenty of Windows guys that do all around IT and fewer Linux guys that know Windows....far-fewer), and require much more manual care than a Windows environment.I've found completely different purposes for Windows an

The TCO is fairly high since Linux Admins tend to command a much higher salary, generally don't crossover as much (I know plenty of Windows guys that do all around IT and fewer Linux guys that know Windows....far-fewer)

Really? I've found it the complete opposite in my 12+ years of being a sysadmin...the people who started off from a linux background are generally good at being jacks of all trades, but the ones who started off from a Windows background aren't quite as well rounded. While I primarily do linux/unix work, my resume is also heavy into Windows stuff, so much that I went to a job interview once where the CIO/linux architect and his windows guru grilled me up and down on the stuff listed on my resume and at the

I know plenty of Windows guys that do all around IT and fewer Linux guys that know Windows....far-fewer

Really? I find that very hard to believe. I've hired lots of Windows guys and not yet had one that had a clue what to do at a Bash prompt. On the other hand, every Linux guy has been in front of a Windows machine at some point. You can't live in this world without coming across Windows somewhere.

I guess it depends on where you are. Most of the Linux guys I know when you mention Active Directory start immediately jumping into LDAP without ever mentioning the fact that Windows' primary authentication mechanism is in fact Kerberos.That said, there's a wide variety of skill sets. Some of the deeper Linux gurus I know do indeed know that, but those people that "get it" are very few and far in between.

I generally gauge someone's systems knowledge by throwing out a memory question. VERY few people underst

Just goes to show that nobody can predict the future with any accuracy, eh? Which makes you wonder why companies would listen to them in the first place.

Who would have guessed that a cheap, ad-supported Worms rip-off (which itself was a Scorched-Earth rip-off, etc.) would get 10m downloads in the first day of the release of its... what... fifth title? And make an awful lot of money. While the Worms sequels tended towards the dire themselves?

“Indeed, I would go so far as to say that very few open source startups will ever get anywhere near to $1 billion. Not because they are incompetent, or because open source will ‘fail’ in any sense. But because the economics of open source software – and therefore the business dynamics – are so different from those of traditional software that it simply won’t be possible in most markets.” – Glyn Moody

There have been, in fact, very few open source startups to get to $1 billion. His quote seems right on.

And before I get flamed, I and my family use Linux exclusively. I sold a mildly-successful, Linux-based business a few years ago.

Of course, if you include any business for which open-source software is critical to its operations, like Google, Facebook or Amazon, then yeah, the quote is nonsense.

The 2011 Q4 stats from IDC show a 56.1 per cent increase in overall slab sales to 28.2 million units; up from the 15.8 million that punters splashed out on in Q3.
In three months Android's percentage of the tablet market has shot up - Android was loaded on 44.6 per cent of tablets sold in Q4, up from 32.3 per cent in Q3.
WebOS and BlackBerry have been practically crushed into the ground: WebOS had zilch and BlackBerry clocked a 0.7 per cent. Windows didn't make a showing. But while iOS is top, it won't be top forever.

It was, then the whole fucking thing up-ended. Ubuntu 10.10 caused me to switch to Linux and 11 caused my to switch to Windows. It wasn't just the buggy interface, there were other problems with the 64bit distro on top of the train-wreck UI and graphical anomalies, and disappearing menus.....

Is the Linux Desktop actually growing? [zdnet.com] quotes a market share figure from Net Applications of 1.4%, up from 0.97% the previous July. Other estimates have put the figure at 1.67%. [linuxfordevices.com] Some analysts are predicting the figure could hit 2% to 3% before the end of 2012.

The author states that 12% of visitors to his tech related web sites run Linux. If that is any indication, then the figure of technologically minded people using Linux desktops already exceeds 10%.

Keep in mind that Apple's global desktop market share is in single figures: Linux desktop market share doesn't have to exceed that of Windows to be considered important.

Desktop is becoming less relavent. Linux or at least a *nix variant will likely own the tablet space (does now but even in the future), I think people will have more tablet/phone like devices than desktops. They still probably will have a desktop/laptop too but they might have 2-4 other computing devices (car systems, phone, tablet, eReader etc) and most of those will be running on *nix I suspect.

How about quotes from the same era about Linux on the desktop? Or quotes from every year since about how this year will be the long heralded Year Of Linux on the desktop?

It started as media hype but this is the era of mobile computing and I would say that Linux has done extremely well in that market. Apple is still #1, Android is #2 but Microsoft is 4th when there is a huge gap between 2nd and 3rd. Android is still a consolation prize until they can start running neck and neck with the iPad and when that happens, you'll have more PR hype asking "Is this the year the [mainstream] desktop dies?"
It's all part of the plan for Linux world dominance. Bow down to your root ov

Android is #1, iOS is #2 [techcrunch.com]. You have to be very careful of weasel words from Apple supporters: they'll make claims like "Apple is the largest single mobile vendor!", but of course all of the Android vendors put together still outnumber Apple. So Android market share is larger than iOS.

So basically, your claim is that if you had a penis, it would be the largest?

I seen fanboys make up some weird figures before, but claiming you are the top seller if you would be selling, that is a new one.

Apple is a big mobile maker, but it is not the biggest. About the only claim that stands is that of single model high-end smartphone, Apple sells the most. That is not a bad title to hold but it has rather a lot of qualifiers.

Mandatory car anology, Ferrari would be the biggest car maker, if they sold small cheap cars.

Well It isn't the same war.Red Hat has distance itself from its consumer business. So they are not competing with Apple who has distance itself from its Server Business.For Microsoft how much of their business is in B2B sales. That would probably give a closer number.

I like Apple, I like Linux and I like Microsoft (Lately). They seem to fill different Niches.

Apple - Has gotten really strong on Mobile. While I have been dishearten with OS X and Macs Apples mobile Offerings are still top of the industry.Mic

How many other failed Linux distros had the same poster hanging in their offices ? It's great to hear Red Hat is doing well for themselves but it's not like there's a vibrant market out there for Linux. Few companies are left standing, and most of those are struggling, Novell, Mandriva,... Even the successful Red Hat at 1 billion in revenue is making a 14th of what Sun was doing just before they were acquired. In that sense Gates was right: Linux hasn't turned out to be the competitor that would sweep ever

Know what else permeates most of Red Hat culture? Reality. They realized years ago that making it easy for people to get your product for free isn't going to make you much money. Thus, no binaries for non-paying customers. You've gotta be willing to compile everything from source yourself. We're making a big deal about a "billion dollar open source company" here, when Red Hat doesn't operate like an "open source" company. They're making money precisely because they operate as close to a proprietary company as possible without violating the GPL. Giving your product away, ready made, is folly if you actually want to make big money (unless you can make money by advertising, a'la Google and Facebook... but operating systems don't work that way).

They don't have to do that. They are only obligated to provide the source on request for a reasonable copying fee to people to whom they distribute binaries to. Instead, they make it freely available to anyone who wants it, without charging a cent for the bandwidth.

Speaking of cents, you can get CentOS [centos.org], which is identical to RHEL minus the branding entirely for free because RedHat make the sources available freely. Also, redhat make the sources avaialble for non GPL software which they simply don't have to do.

So, the claim that they are as proprietary as possible is simply false.

I think they mean winning the war on perception. Plus, their business model is markedly different. Apple is a hardware vendor (with some software thrown in) dedicated to consumer grade equipment (mac pro being the exception, and the now defunct xserve line). Microsoft is like GE where they have their hands in 80 million different pies, consumer and enterprise. Red Hat essentially offers support and maintains an extremely stable distribution (with a ton of kernel development thrown in) - and they're only in

If you want a server you can spend a pile of cash on windows and it will run ok-ish if you take a lot of care setting it up or you can get better security, performance, and flexibility without the lock-in and at a lower cost from RedHat.

Looks like RedHat isn't winning the war, they have already won it. The only thing they are not so good at it is using that leverage to collect massive amounts of cash from their customers and from people who are no

When Bill Gates made that comment, Linux was already the most deployed HTTP server plattform, in our datacenter there were lots of customers running large deployments of 1 HU linux servers and Linux was encroaching the embedded market with lots of appliances being built on top of a linux base installation.

That was also before MS had a lot of success in the server space. In 2001 MS went from 42->49% of the server space: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-959049.html [cnet.com], in 2011 it was 73.9%. Linux gained marketshare but so did windows and they went from a minority share to a large majority share. As much of a flop as Vista was people forget that MS revenue has gone crazy mostly because they've started to dominate serverland.

That quote sounds more like Strategic FUD. It doesn't take a genius to realize that when students and enthusiasts are, in large numbers, rallying to a competing operating system, you've got some future trouble heading your way.

As the CEO of a large company, you're not going to say anything to try to *encourage* people to look at the competition, so you demean and minimize it.

If they earn $40 billion more next year, they could make the bottom of the Fortune 500 list.I won't argue with their success and I'm happy that they're happy, but in the grander scheme of things, they have a long way to go.

Depends on what war we want them to win. MS are brilliant at extracting money from customers and even non-customers who buy computer hardware, that's not the kind of company I'd like to deal with as a customer.